If I had to describe Cobalt Strike in one word, I’d say ‘flexible’. There are a lot of options to control Cobalt Strike’s features and indicators. In this post, I’ll introduce these options, explain the rationale for each, and point you to resources to explore them further. Aggressor Script Aggressor Script is Cobalt Strike’s built-in […]
CTA Type: Blog
Cobalt Strike 3.9 – Livin’ in a Stager’s Paradise
Cobalt Strike 3.9 is now available. This release brings several additions to Malleable C2 with an emphasis on staging flexibility. Malleable HTTP/S Staging Stagers are tiny programs that download the Beacon payload and pass control to it. Stagers are a way to use a size-constrained attack to deliver a large payload like Beacon. While I recommend […]
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OPSEC Considerations for Beacon Commands
Update January 9, 2020 – This topic is now part of the Cobalt Strike documentation. Head over to the Beacon Command Behavior page for the latest version of this information. A good operator knows their tools and has an idea of how the tool is accomplishing its objectives on their behalf. This blog post surveys […]
Cobalt Strike 3.8 – Who’s Your Daddy?
Cobalt Strike 3.8 is now available. This release adds features to spawn processes with an alternate parent process. This release also gives the operator control over the script templates Cobalt Strike uses in its attacks and workflows. Processes with Alternate Parents A favorite hunt technique is to instrument a host to report all new processes, […]
Java Startup Bug in Java 1.8u131
If you recently updated your penetration testing environment, it’s possible you were greeted with a special surprise. Cobalt Strike and its team server will no longer start. Instead of Cobalt Strike, you’re now greeted with this very intuitive and helpful error: The Parallel GC can not be combined with -XX:ParallelGCThreads=0. I’ve had a few emails […]
Cobalt Strike 3.7 – Cat, Meet Mouse
The 8th release of the Cobalt Strike 3.0 series is now available. The release extends Malleable C2 to influence how Beacon lives in memory, adds code-signing for executables, and gives operators control over which proxy server Beacon uses. There’s a lot of good stuff here. Let’s dig into it. Malleable PE A key goal of Cobalt Strike is to challenge […]
High-reputation Redirectors and Domain Fronting
Working on Cobalt Strike, I get some insight into what folks are trying to do with it. Recently, the use of domain fronting for redirectors has come on my radar. A redirector is a server that sits between your malware controller and the target network. Domain fronting is a collection of techniques to make use […]
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Scripting Matt Nelson’s MMC20.Application Lateral Movement Technique
This is a short blog post with a long title. A few weeks ago, Matt Nelson published Lateral Movement Using the MMC20.APPLICATION COM Object (there’s a Part 2 as well!). The post documents an option, beyond the usual suspects (e.g., services, scheduled tasks, wmi, etc.), to ask a remote system to run a process for […]
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My First Go with BloodHound
I finally had a chance to sit down and play with BloodHound. This was an item on my hacker todo list for awhile now. In this blog post, I’ll take you through my initial steps setting up and using this tool. It’s my hope that this information will help you get started with BloodHound too. […]
Cobalt Strike 3.6 – A Path for Privilege Escalation
Cobalt Strike 3.6 is now available. This release adds an API to use third-party privilege escalation exploits with Beacon and extends Malleable C2 to allow HTTP C&C without HTTP POST. This release also includes fixes and improvements for existing features. Privilege Escalation API This release adds an API to integrate privilege escalation exploits into Beacon’s […]
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